Good article. But the United States has a political interest in making the rules for trade in the Pacific that are likely to trump any economic arguments against the TPP. That's not altogether bad, however, since the US was the proponent of some of the TPP's most questionable features, like the dispute settlement mechanism and the IP features. Opponents should simply use the US political interest against those features by arguing that the treaty will stand without them, though it may take another round of negotiations. Let the US proponents of those features explain why they're so important that a treaty without them would not be worth having.

I understand the TPP talks started among Burunei, Singapore, New Zealand and Chile, all small countries in terms of GDP so that the talks were meaningful. Big countries were not interested.
The United States and Japan have an about eighty percent share in the total volume of economies combined of all participant countries, and taxes are already not imposed , or very low taxes when imposed, on most commodities traded between the Unites States and Japan and so, I do not see any reason that TPP will be a big economic stimulant.
TPP will incur complaint and criticism, as many comments below suggest, in the middle or the long term and may turn out to be another big cause for the decline of American influence and prestige in this area. I do not like it to happen.

"Lower tariffs and increased competition is a net benefit for the world." Errr... what tariffs were high? What tariffs are being lowered, and by how much? Hardly any tariffs between the nations represented here were higher than 2%.
"Agreements to protect patents, trademarks and intelligent property rights promote investment and increases world productivity." Hello? Restricting availability of data increases productivity? Increasing the length of government granted monopolies promotes investment? What color is the sky on the planet where you live? I notice you have nothing to say about the Investor State Dispute Settlement clauses, which many of us see as expanding the current corrupt dispute settlement system, which already overrides national environmental and public health laws.

So far, so good, but there are two aspects of the TPP unadressed - and maybe they're the most important. One is the way intellectual property rights militate against things new, or better ways of doing things old.

But far more important is the dispute-resolution mechanism, whereby a company can sue a government for the projected costs - to that company,naturally - via anticipated loss of income from specific laws or regulations. Governments can be penalized for such losses. Read: made to pay for. Such regulations may be clearly in the public interest - reduction in pollution, for instance. Or any law that would for example reduce consumption of sweet fizzy drinks. Or regulate the number of hours a driver/pilot/ ... could work in a week.

Disputes of this kind, between companies and sovereign nations, , are arbitrated not via the regular civil courts, but a special kind of court which has the legal power to override government policy - of any kind. This is a three-party judgement machine with (so far as I know) no appeal mechanism. Once again, democracy is rendered utterly impotent - and so irrelevant.

AS an example (tho of course nod directly from the TPP, which hasn't yet come into force), consider Greece vs. Wplfgang Schauble, last Summer.

Economics is the least of it, so far as the overall effect of the TPP is concerned. There are curious resonances of the feudal system, with multinationals playing the part of Lords, running the peasantry to the Lords' advantage. This is well worth kicking against, hard. The by comparison negligible effect on the economy of a few lower tariffs etc is lost in these major disadvantages. the TPP was negotiated in complete secrecy for a very good reason - no voting public would stand for it. Rightly so.

Many of those who ridicule climate change deniers correctly point out that 99% of all PhD meteorologists agree that carbon dioxide is associated with rising global temperatures. However free-trade opponents do not consider the fact that that 99% of all PhD economists agree that free-trade and the TPP in particular will greatly benefit America and raise standards of living .
Protectionism is the progressivism of fools. Gandhi was a great statesman but a horrible economist. Just as the ignorant in the USA argue that American workers who earn $15 per hour should not have to compete with Chinese workers who make $2 per hour, Gandhi thought that Indian workers should not have to compete with American and European workers who have the benefit of modern machines. As a result India adopted protectionism. In 1947 the per capita income of India was similar to countries such a South Korea. By 1977 the per capita income and standard of living in South Korea was ten times that of India. India has since largely abandoned protectionism and has benefited immensely from free trade. Just as David Ricardo proved would be the case when he developed the concept of comparative advantage.

“....Equally unhelpful in terms of addressing the income and wealth inequality which results in the overinvestment cycle that caused the depression are various non-tax factors. Issues such a minimum wage laws, unwed mothers, globalization, free trade, unionization, problems with our education system and infrastructure can increase the income and wealth inequality. However, these are extremely minor when compared to the shift of the tax burden from the rich to the middle class. It is the compounding effect of shift away from taxes on capital income such as dividends each year as the rich get proverbially richer which is the prime generator of inequality…”
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1543642

I assume that the author's final statement that the "process of careful assessment [of the TPP] is now underway" is correct. However, that comment points out a significant flaw in the way that agreements such as the TPP are arrived at.

While certain types of international negotiations may have to remain secret until concluded in order to achieve a desirable result, trade negotiations do not fall within that category. Rather, for trade negotiations to achieve a desirable result they should be freely and openly discussed while they are being conducted in order to give everyone in a nation that is participating in the talks an opportunity to assess whether their country's negotiators are properly weighing the benefits and costs that would result from the inclusion of certain provisions in a trade agreement.

I have little doubt that if the proposed terms of the TPP had been openly and publicly discussed during the years of its negotiation, the resulting document would have been far different than the version of the TPP that has been agreed upon (but not yet ratified).

If you would like a very good example of why free trade is a really, really bad idea, just think back a few years to the "shortage" of rare earths that China engineered as leverage against Japan and its allies.

Once upon a time, the US had a thriving rare earth industry. And, with trade barriers, we still would have one. Now, we are at the mercy of China's government. And we have even lost the intellectual property -- the knowledge of how to produce these essential materials -- so we cannot restart production.

If you really insist on a pure economic argument, then consider this: Every single industry in the U.S. that depends on rare earths today is less valuable than it might otherwise be, because of the uncertainty of supply of the critical materials. Exactly what do you think is going to happen once the U.S. electric vehicle market is facing competition from Chinese imports? I can almost guarantee that there will be a "shortage" of rare earth magnets that will limit production of US vehicles.

Thus, without trade barriers, we have lost control of our destiny. And, rare earths are just one example of the ways that this is happening. You do not need an economic model to understand this.

While I understand hot the ability to get rare earth metals from other sourced more cheaply caused the US to stop producing such metals, I fail to understand how the US could have "lost" the knowledge of how to produce rare earths simply because it stopped doing so for a period of time.

TTP clearly a step in the right direction. Lower tariffs and increased competition is a net benefit for the world. Agreements to protect patents, trademarks and intelligent property rights promote investment and increases world productivity.
Simple models are often better than 2nd order complex models especially when the scenario (no action) against which benefits is to be measured is not an option. Increased world trade and trade reform will occur with or without the US input. If US does not shape & adopt TTP then China or others will set the base course scenario.

What do you propose? It's so hard to distinguish the Chinese type of currency manipulation, as opposed to the Quantitative Easing undertaken in other parts of the world -- artificially creating value vs maintaining current value. Furthermore, it's even tougher to implement an effective measure to combat manipulation.

I built an early interactive corporate circa 1968. My impression still is that models are useful for purposes far more limited than speculating about the results of secret back-room deals TPP. Models are dependent on accuracy of data. Garbage in garbage out.

TPP/TTIP/EU/.. has two effects:
1) It puts social, environmental and fiscal regions in competition to lower standards
2) Given economies of scales, it also leads to the emergence of gigantic corporation who end up in an oligopolistic position at best. The giants, through lobby, can further change regulations to prevent entry in "their" market (intellectual properties) and force the former competitors to close (by imposing so many 'safety' or 'hygiene' norms and tests that are too expensive for small scale production to be viable).

it might be more efficient in the short run and in terms of mass productions only. However, THe environment is being destroyed and social distress is sky-rocketing. Very few can have the pride to be their own bosses or making their own things, as everyone submits to the greater order of money, leading to psychiatric diseases with no common scale in history.

The promotion of "free trade" used to be beneficial, at least for developed countries. It allowed for a much more efficient allocation of resources, and by opening markets stimulated sales. Since wage rates in developed countries were not radically different, and since the technology available before WWII made it unfeasible to offshore jobs, free trade had little adverse impact on labor. What current free trade advocates seem to miss is that the technological conditions have radically changed, so that free trade now exposes developed nation labor to an international labor market subject to a version of Gresham's law.

I believe this development has a much more serious impact than job loss alone; it also bears much responsibility for the widely noted stagnation of wages because it puts many more jobs in peril of being offshored, to coin a nasty word. The Republicans have been effective at addressing the emotional impact of these problems; it remains for the Democrats to fashion and present plausible practical answers.

All true but since the politicians biggest donors will do quite well out of the deal it will pass anyway for all the solemn speeches against. The politicians know who their Masters are and aint the voters.

The impression of the TPP is that the largest multinationals got together and agreed how to further reinforce the extraction of undue oligopolistic rent from ordinary people of these countries.
Free Trade is increased competition and opportunities for both small and medium companies and benefits for ordinary consumers

A very thoughtful op-ed.
For another assessment, see the Tufts study, which uses a model that incorporates effects on employment excluded from prior TPP modeling. The authors find that benefits for economic growth are more limited, and they are negative in some countries such as the United States. More importantly, they find that TPP would lead to losses in employment and increases in inequality. http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/TPP_simulations.html

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